This paper deals with the rationalist assumptions behind researches of artificial intelligence (AI) on the basis of Hubert Dreyfus’s critique. Dreyfus is a leading American philosopher known for his rigorous critique on the underlying assumptions of the field of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence specialists, especially those whose view is commonly dubbed as “classical AI,” assume that creating a thinking machine like the human brain is not a too far away project because they believe that human intelligence works on the basis (...) of formalized rules of logic. In contradistinction to classical AI specialists, Dreyfus contends that it is impossible to create intelligent computer programs analogous to the human brain because the workings of human intelligence is entirely different from that of computing machines. For Dreyfus, the human mind functions intuitively and not formally. Following Dreyfus, this paper aims to pinpointing the major flaws classical AI suffers from. The author of this paper believes that pinpointing these flaws would inform inquiries on and about artificial intelligence. Over and beyond this, this paper contributes something indisputably original. It strongly argues that classical AI research programs have, though inadvertently, falsified an entire epistemological enterprise of the rationalists not in theory as philosophers do but in practice. When AI workers were trying hard in order to produce a machine that can think like human minds, they have in a way been testing—and testing it up to the last point—the rationalist assumption that the workings of the human mind depend on logical rules. Result: No computers actually function like the human mind. Reason: the human mind does not depend on the formal or logical rules ascribed to computers. Thus, symbolic AI research has falsified the rationalist assumption that ‘the human mind reaches certainty by functioning formally’ by virtue of its failure to create a thinking machine. (shrink)

The paper shows how Karl Popper's critique of 'historicism' is permeated by psychoanalytic discourse regardless of his critique that psychoanalysis is one of the exemplars of pseudoscience. Early on, when he was formulating his philosophy of science, Popper had an apparently stringent criterion, viz. falsifiablity, and painstaking analysis. The central argument of this paper is that despite his representation of psychoanalysis as the principal illustration of the category he dubs as 'pseudoscience', Popper's analysis has been infused with psychoanalysis when it (...) comes to his social and political philosophy. Besides, not only was his interpretation of the proponents of 'historicism' and the 'closed' society mediated by the very concepts of a field which he indicted as pseudoscientific but also he frequently slipped into vacuous and unverifiable accusations forgetting the jurisdiction he formerly accorded to empirical adequacy and logical consistency when examining and assessing theories. (shrink)

Don Ihde tries to conceptualize cross-cultural technology transfer within the post-phenomenological perspective. Using his concept of the multistability of technological artifacts, Ihde discusses how technologies could have a variety of uses in different contexts. When taken at the level of international technology transfer, i.e. the level where technologies move from one cultural geography to another, there will be two contexts: (i) the context where the artifact is being produced and (ii) the context into which it is moving to. Ihde’s problem (...) lies in emphasizing the first and almost concluding with certainty that technologization is Westernization. Consequently, his theory of technology transfer, in addition to being culturalist, gives priority to the cultural context from which it was physically separated to the culture in which it has started functioning. The author of this paper critically engages this tendentiously culturalist point of view. (shrink)